“In the immortal words of Noel Gallagher, I’m gonna live for ever,” says Lars Ulrich. Sitting in Metallica’s backstage complex at the Reading festival in southern England, which they call “the Barrio,” the drummer is considering how long his band — one of the biggest live draws in the world, the group that reinvented metal and made it credible — can continue. The question of the famously combustible group’s lifespan, is Ulrich admits, “the US$64,000 question. The Rolling Stones are setting a great precedent, but Charlie Watts doesn’t play drums on songs like Fight Fire With Fire every night, no disrespect. “Will we be able to play the shit we do when we’re 65? I don’t know. When it becomes a joke, we’ll stop.”
Some people feared Metallica had reached that point a few years ago — certainly their new release, Death Magnetic, is being promoted as the “return to form” album, and there is a sense they need to prove both their mettle and their metal all over again. Their last album, 2003’s St Anger, topped the charts around the world, but sold just 1.8 million copies in the US, a fraction of what Metallica’s previous few offerings had sold. Instead of being the back-to-basics exercise the band had intended after a decade spent meandering away from their thrash-metal origins, it captured a band in crisis, a period recorded in the group-sanctioned documentary of the sessions, Some Kind of Monster. Bassist Jason Newsted had left after 14 years of being undermined as “the new boy” (he had replaced Cliff Burton, who died in a road accident in 1986). Singer/guitarist James Hetfield — Ulrich’s co-leader — had gone into rehab. The band hired a therapist to try to hold everything together, only for him to try to offer creative input to the band. The documentary played like a tragi-comic hybrid of This Is Spinal Tap and The Larry Sanders Show.
“St Anger happened because it had to happen,” says Hetfield. “It sounds very disjointed to me when I listen to it now. One-dimensional. Relentless. And that’s exactly how we felt at the time: We were disjointed, and I think the resentment we felt towards each other was relentless.”
St Anger was, Ulrich contends, “an isolated, one-off experience. Things aren’t like that now.” Their new album, is something of a make-or-break then, where the world will see whether Metallica is still creatively vital, whether their future holds more than living well off their legacy and back catalogue. Bob Rock — who became Metallica’s producer with 1991’s eponymously titled release, which has come to be known as the “Black album” — is no longer at the helm in the studio, and gone is the more polished, accessible sound that he brought. The hope is that his replacement, Rick Rubin, will achieve what he did for Johnny Cash and Slayer: in the first case, rejuvenate a drifting career; in the second, focus an aggressive, fast metal band to produce their best work.
“Rick’s initial seed for motivation, his mission statement, was ‘essence of Metallica,’” says Hetfield, meaning he wanted to return to the sound of the albums that made the group’s name: 1986’s Master of Puppets and 1988’s ... And Justice for All.
“We had stayed clear of the sound of those records for so many years,” says Ulrich. “We were scared of going near them, because if we tried to repeat them again, there was a chance we could dilute them, or ruin them. We basically ran screaming in 28 other directions for the next 20 years, almost.”
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